SANTA BARBARA, CALIF.- The Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) is pleased to announce Vian Sora: Outerworlds, a multi-venue mid-career survey of internationally renowned abstract painter Vian Sora (b. 1976, Baghdad). Organized jointly by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Asia Society Texas, Houston; and Speed Art Museum, Louisville, this exhibition will assemble approximately 20 of Sora’s major works, charting her growth as an artist over a period of seven years (2016–2023).

Outerworlds is Sora’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States and will tell the story of how her multivalent paintings abstractly channel the tumultuous events of her life, ancient Mesopotamian history, and Iraq’s diverse natural landscapes, including its deserts, rivers, and archeological sites. Vian Sora: Outerworlds will debut at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art on June 22, 2025 before traveling to the Speed Art Museum and Asia Society Texas.

Born in Baghdad, Sora had her first solo exhibition in Iraq in 2001. She lived through the Iran- Iraq War, the Gulf War, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the subsequent Insurgency. She later left Iraq, sought refugee status for her family in the United Arab Emirates, and then eventually resettled in Louisville, Kentucky. In 2016, Sora realized she needed to use abstraction to process all that she had lived through from Iraq to the settlement in the United States. Her painting has transformed into a high-powered, bodily, and dynamic practice of controlled chaos. Her canvases reflect an array of radiant paints that are splashed, poured, and sprayed onto the canvas. Pigments run, accumulate, and clash, resulting in upwards of fifty layers of oil and acrylic paint in a single work. For Sora, the multilayered effects of her paintings give a concrete form to the chaos of life. The paintings reference both the realm of biology with its cycles of growth, decay, and evolution, as well as the tumultuous history of her homeland, and inevitable recurrence of wars, violence, and eventual regeneration.

Describing her powerful process, Sora says in a recent Observer interview, “I initiate each of my works with the canvas flat, then I utilize fast-drying spray paint, acrylics, pigments and inks, applying each…with brushes, sponges, spray bottles or my breath to move the medium, creating passages…like ventricles, sometimes tissue. I then use oil to control the disarray, layering various hues in an intuitive process…that attempts to constrain chaos, when life regenerates from detritus.” According to Owen Duffy, the Nancy C. Allen Curator and Director of Exhibitions at Asia Society Texas, “Sora’s paintings brim with dense visuals that can be understood as spaces of visual conflict where hues and colors collide, absorb into one another, and bleed.”